Illegal hunting poses a considerable threat to the wildlife of Serengeti National Park and its affiliated protected areas. Techniques for successful mitigation of this threat are heavily debated. Bottom-up community-based initiatives aim to curb poaching by linking local communities with wildlife conservation. Top-down anti-poaching enforcement of protected areas seeks to maintain wildlife populations through fines and prison sentences given to arrested poachers. Poverty stands as the major driver of illegal hunting as households vie for income and sustenance. Livelihoods of illegal hunters have been augmented considerably through revenue generated from bushmeat sales. Illegal hunters use bushmeat both for supplementing household protein and for economic gain. Obtaining bushmeat carries risks in the form of personal injury, fines, and/or prison sentences, if arrested. This paper compares these costs and benefits through a summary of the monetary benefits, bodily injuries, fines, and prison sentences that individuals endured over their poaching careers. Data were collected from 104 individuals, all of whom voluntarily admitted active or recent involvement in illegal hunting activities.

Poaching for bushmeat is a major problem for conservation of wildlife populations in many parts of Africa, including the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania. However, the severity of the poaching problem is often unclear because of a lack of accurate data. Directly asking people to self-report illegal activity faces the obvious problem of under-reporting. Use of arrest records from anti-poaching patrols may reflect levels of poaching activity but could also be driven by funding and quality of anti-poaching efforts. A third method, assessing poaching by asking about bushmeat consumption, is indirect, possibly subject to under-reporting, and also subject to limits on the accuracy of memory of respondents. We compare rates of poaching derived by self-assessment of poaching activities (based on household interviews), dietary recall of bushmeat consumption over a variety of time frames, and arrest records from anti-poaching units. We apply these three methods to assess poaching activities in three villages bordering protected areas on the western boundary of Serengeti National Park. Our results showed that dietary recall of bushmeat consumption and arrest records indicated similar patterns of poaching across the three villages but self-reporting differed significantly. There appear to be significant advantages to coupling results from dietary recall of bushmeat consumption and arrest records to estimate the level of poaching activity. In situations where reliable data from anti-poaching units are unavailable, cost-effective data collection of bushmeat consumption will provide a viable alternative to assess levels of poaching involvement of villages that border protected areas.

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